Thursday, October 3, 2013

Republican House GOP/TP Own the Shutdown of the Government

“Speaker John Boehner won’t even let the bill get a yes-or-no vote because he doesn’t want to anger the extremists in his party,” the president said. If the speaker allows a vote, Mr. Obama added, within minutes “we can get back to the business of helping the American people.” President Obama, 10/03/2012
I am so proud of my vote for Barack Obama for President last November as I have watched him stand up to the hostage takers in the Republican Party and not budge. This was my first vote for a Democrat for President. Today I feel like I hit the jackpot in getting the kind of President I have wanted for years who puts the people of America first. I have been privileged to be on conference calls with OFA and have listened to some of the most articulate and knowledgeable people I have ever heard on a conference call. It is a 180 from previous times on conference calls with the GOP.

An open mic and camera caught Rand Paul discussing shutdown strategy with Mitch McConnell. Paul admitted that Republicans don’t want to be there, and their only hope is to look reasonable.

(snip)

Rand Paul admitted to the world the Republicans only hope of getting out of the government shutdown is if Democrats didn’t focus group test their talking points enough. It is nice to see Mitch McConnell confirm that there isn’t going to be a secret deal. Obama is telling Republicans privately the exact same thing that he is saying publicly. They are going to get nothing.

However, Republicans are saying something publicly that they don’t believe privately. Publicly, the Republicans are talking tough. Privately, they are desperate for a way out of the shutdown that allows them to claim some little symbolic or token victory.

After saying no to everything since Obama took office, Republicans aren’t going to be able to fool people into thinking that they are the party of compromise with a few well tested shutdown talking points. Paul has the mood of the country wrong. The American people want these games to stop. The Democratic message is a call for the American people to take a stand against these partisan games. Republicans don’t have a counter message to the actual mood of the country.

Rand Paul is delusional if he thinks that Republicans are going to win this. They’ve already lost. The only things left to be determined are the size of the loss, and whether or not this will cost them control of the House in 2014.

Rand Paul basically admitted that the Republican tough talk is empty. Paul probably thought he was being clever by speaking to McConnell in front of the camera and mic, but all he did was dig the hole a little deeper for the Republican Party.

Even now GOP are looking for words to dig them out of this hole they are in thanks to the hard right of which Rand Paul is a member. Senate GOP wants to put pressure on the House GOP/TP, then vote unanimously in the Senate for a clean CR which the GOP Senators are refusing to do. Backbones missing in today's Koch funded GOP.

My email today to my Congressman about this GOP/TP House Shutdown of the Government:

Tom"Seventy-two percent of respondents overall disapprove, including 76 percent of independents and 49 percent of Republicans. Even among respondents who disapprove of the president's health care law, 59 percent disapprove of shutting down the government to force changes to it. More Americans blame Republicans for the shutdown than blame President Barack Obama and the Democrats, by a margin of 44 to 35 percent. Seventeen percent blame both parties."

Would love to have seen the breakout of Republican women because most women I know believe there is a Republican War on Women. You are the ONLY member of the OK delegation who voted for the VAWA so it shows you are not afraid to break ranks.

The very fact that Boehner won't bring the clean CR to the floor for a vote to end the shutdown makes zero sense to the people who I know who have been around politics. It also makes no sense that the GOP is lying when they say only 30-40 are keeping this from happening. Even with the Hastert Rule they could not keep it from coming to the floor. I watch the video of the Saturday night GOP Conference going out in the hall and you were all giddy knowing you were going to be on the losing end by shutting down the government unless all the drinking made you all delusional and refusing to face reality. I didn't see one Republican face that was sad but I saw you with thumbs up and talking about a good bill.

ACA is NOT a bill, it is a law which some Neanderthal Republicans cannot seem to get through their heads. Because you don't like a like law, you cannot pick and choose.

Anyone with a brain knew the GOP tactics were going to fail and polls are starting to show that. You and your buddies are putting our Nation's economy at risk for what? Trying to hold the debt ceiling hostage on October 17 since you have held the budget hostage.

When you attached a conference committee on the budget to the clean CR, you looked like fools as you have refused 18 times to send GOP Reps to a Conference Committee on the Budget. I hear your members talking about the Senate didn't pass a budget but they passed one in March. American people should be asked why the GOP stalled until the end of the fiscal year when the Democrats agreed to take your numbers. It doesn't take a genius to know you did this on purpose thinking the President would cave but he didn't because he has the support of the American people like me to stand up to hostage takers.

Over 10,000,000 Americans hit the site for ACA which crashed the site including a lot of them from red states which is ignored. The very idea the GOP supports uninsured going to emergency rooms for care is stupid but then your lack of caring about the poor is even worse. Talk farm and oil subsidies and the GOP/TP House is right there voting to keep which destroying food stamps. Now in OK if you don't have a job, are single, and cannot find work, you cannot get any food stamps. I would rather see one instance of fraud and feed thousands then be the judge and jury to make someone go hungry.

Passing a Veterans budget bill that calls for less funding then agreed to is nothing but a PR stunt and thankfully the Democrats have woken up to how underhanded the GOP has become over the years. GOP/TP House is not dealing with a full deck and as the hours tick by you have lost the Chamber plus 251 organizations, Wall Street, and now CEO's but somewhere missing is the Koch Brothers and their vast minions of wanting to take down the Government.

When I heard the voices of the hard right in the media and see them on line talking about an overthrow of the President, it is scary. We elected him -- it wasn't any fraud and it wasn't ACORN which is out of business even if some members of Congress try to defund -- it was the American people. Now the hard right refuses to acknowledge the results of the election and acknowledge without gerrymandering this would not have happened as votes for Democrats for the House were over one million more for the Democrats. Yet your Conference decided to play with the continuing resolution for what? It makes no sense to go down this path against the American people. What is there to gain? More money from the Koch's?

You have some of the dumbest people in the House I have ever heard talk but they follow instructions well as they came to DC to shutdown Government and that is what the members of the GOP in the House have allowed to happen. You let Freshman takeover knowing full well they were loyal to Bachmann who is one of the worst members of Congress ever and right down there with stupidity and instead of working pulling stunts like the WWII Memorial.

Stop the stunts and pass a clean CR and a clean debt ceiling. Start helping mold the ACA instead of acting like spoiled brats who lost the game. As one person said on Twitter maybe Notre Dame should have asked for a redo so they could add 15 points to the score after they lost (to OU).

One group is thanking you, the fundraisers of the Democrats because the GOP/TP House has handed them a bonanza of donations from small donors who all have votes something the GOP has forgotten while going after big donors.

Pass a clean continuing resolution and debt ceiling or that number of 72% is going to continue to climb as ordinary people (those ones that the GOP ignores today) are starting to lose money and resources they count on to live.

Regards,Sharon

Republican big donors have shut up their checkbooks to the GOP yet the House GOP continues down this road and ignore many of the big donors who have underwritten GOP campaigns -- makes no sense:

“I have been in politics for 45 years,” said Georgette Mosbacher, a cosmetics CEO in New York whom The Washington Post once called “the eccentric grande dame of GOP fundraising.” “Every time something does not work, it has to be blamed on an entity ‘out there.’ Well, I am sorry, but the Tea Party isn’t that powerful, and anybody who stopped to think about it long enough would know that.”

House GOP/TP could end the shutdown right now by bringing to the floor and passing a CLEAN CR but Boehner refuses to do that so the shutdown continues while spin that it is the Democrats fault for negotiating wears thin. There never should have been any negotiation on the continuing resolution. Pass a CLEAN CR -- no negotiation.

Right now, Democrats and Republicans remain at loggerheads over financing the federal government. Some Republicans have suggested that a broader bargain, including changes to entitlement programs, might be one path forward. But the White House has insisted that Republicans not include the debt ceiling in any negotiations.

Nearly 190 Democrats, including all members of the party’s House leadership team, have signed a letter circulated by Representative Peter Welch of Vermont supporting a “clean” debt-ceiling extension.

Republicans “view the health care bill as an existential threat to the country, and they are willing to use all tactics, including blowing up the economy, to get rid of Obamacare,” Mr. Welch said in an interview. “If shutdown and default become legitimate tactics, any Congress in the future could use those tactics to get their way.”

Wall Street “should be concerned,” President Obama told CNBC on Wednesday. “When you have a situation in which a faction is willing to potentially default on U.S. government obligations, then we’re in trouble.”

He added that it was “important” for Wall Street “to recognize that this is going to have a profound impact on our economy and their bottom lines, their employees and their shareholders.”

After the meeting late yesterday at the White House, it is obvious that the Republicans are not budging from their hard right stance in shutting down the Government. We were warned when the GOP came to Congress they wanted to shut down the Government. What did the House GOP leadership do, bow down to the new Tea Party Representatives and put them on leadership and major committees. They are now reaping the results of the stupid move and because of their lack of backbones, they have shutdown the government costing 800,000+ their jobs and income.

WASHINGTON — An impassioned President Obama on Thursday kept up the pressure on House Republicans to end the three-day-old government shutdown, appearing at a small construction company outside the capital to challenge Speaker John A. Boehner to quit blocking a vote on federal spending.

“This isn’t happening because of some financial crisis. It’s happening because of a reckless Republican shutdown in Washington,” he said, to cheers and calls of “That’s right!” from the assembled construction workers at M. Luis Construction, a company formed by Portuguese immigrants in Rockville, Md., a suburb north of Washington.

“Remember, it was just five years ago that our economy was in a free fall,” Mr. Obama said, speaking on the fifth anniversary of Congress’s vote to bail out the nearly collapsed financial system. Since then, he said, businesses have added more than 7.5 million jobs, an improving housing market has helped construction companies recover, and auto sales have continued to grow. “We can’t afford to threaten that progress right now.”

Mr. Obama’s appearance came just after the Treasury Department released a report arguing that a default could provoke a recession “comparable to or worse” than the one deepened by the financial crisis of 2008, which was the worst since the Depression.Besides the well-publicized disruption of the shutdown for tourists, veterans, older people and children in Head Start, Mr. Obama added, “Companies like this one worry that their businesses are going to be disrupted.” The federal government provides $1 billion a month in loans to small businesses that now cannot be processed, he said.

Time for the Republican Party to stop all the hate rhetoric as anything that goes down is not going to be good if the chatter on line is any indication.